rand, it is said, declared to Madame de Staël that his money was exhausted, and that he would have to blow out his brains if, in a month, she could not find him a way to supplies. This is the version of Barante, the least inventive of men, who knew them both well, who had seen the Memoirs, and who goes on to describe the meeting with the director and the scene at Suresnes, as they do. If the well-informed and disinterested historian deserves credit, the Memoirs must be discarded as a concatenation of insincerity. But he is not a sufficient witness to carry such a verdict. For he says that the friends soon afterwards quarrelled, that Talleyrand never ceased to detest the woman to whom he owed so much, and that she, in her anger, never again dreamed of a reconciliation. Nevertheless, in February 1809, she entreated his intervention with the Emperor, in terms which would have been barely dignified in any circumstances, and are incompatible with unforgiveness. The breach on her side cannot have been as incurable as Barante has described it. Yet the occasion was one which might have justified strong feelings.
The American envoys made it known that they had been invited to bestow a present of money on the French minister, and Talleyrand had laughed at the idea of being challenged to repel the accusation. The reproach of official corruption is, perhaps, the most difficult to meet of all those that he incurred. Count Senfft, who, when I knew him, was an inmate of the Jesuits' College at Innsbruck, but who had been Talleyrand's warm admirer and friend as early as 1806, relates that he caused a sum of four millions of florins to be returned to the Poles, when he found that he was unable to serve their cause ; but that he accepted gifts of money from the German princes, whose interest he promoted, including one payment of forty thousand pounds from the King of Saxony. Senfft himself was Saxon Minister, and as such in the secrets both of Dresden and Warsaw. Bacourt, who has been careful to ascertain that Metternich and Nesselrode received no millions from France, says nothing in exoneration of his chief and patron. The next volume,
